Eric Siu and Neil Patel predict what SEO will look like in 2019. Voice search through Alexa will grow, semantic search and AI will matter more, and Google is moving to mobile-first indexing. They discuss why monetizing voice is still a problem.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we are going to talk about how SEO is going to change in 2019.
Neil, if you think about SEO, where it's heading, whether you guys like it or not, is voice search. It's not just SEO, it's the world. You look at Alexa from Amazon, everyone is starting to use, you know, Alexa as being like, Alexa, What's 3 plus 3? I know that sounds funny, but my nephew, he can ask Alexa for his homework and my sister has to tell him, hey, you're not allowed to ask Alexa anytime you have homework problems because Alexa just tells him the right answer. And if you think about it, search is changing. We, in our days, when we have questions, we would have just Googled it. But now people are just asking things like Alexa what the answers are. And because of that, SEO is going to change into more and more voice search. And when it changes into voice search, what you'll see is like you have rich snippets and Google taking your data, it's going to get even worse in which they're going to just take your data and show it through a microphone or a speaker. And you're not going to get anyone coming to your website because of that.
Yeah. And so what I like, I mean, again, going back to, if you didn't hear the last couple episodes, but I was at TED last week and then I was listening to Ray Kurzweil speak and he works on AI. This guy is a total futurist. Like all the predictions he made, I think he guesses that he's 86% correct from when he started guessing that people, a lot of people would be using super phones, you know, all the time. And what he said was, or the tool that he developed was a tool that helps with semantic search. So what does that mean? That means you are able to search millions and millions of books all at one time. Maybe you might type in the question, what is love? And semantic means it looks for the meaning of what you're looking for, right? and it shows a bunch of, you know, what a bunch of books say about the meaning of love. Or, you know, what is, what is, I don't know, what is SEO, for example? Maybe there's a bunch of books out there. So that's where things are going. They're looking at not just, you know, keyword-based kind of, you know, search results, but semantically, like, what do you mean? And that ties into what Neil's talking about around voice search. A lot of this stuff is happening. That means the results that we're used to seeing, a lot of them are going to change. Because we don't necessarily need for a query like, what's 1 1? We don't need 10 results, we don't need 10 links, we just need one answer, like Alexa, for example. So you got voice search coming, you got semantic stuff going on, that's also combining with AI, like all this stuff is melding together.
Yeah, and think of it this way. Eric, you work with Alexa, right? The Amazon SEO company?
Mm-hmm.
Did you know they don't even rank on page 1 for the term Alexa?
Yep.
I searched this yesterday. They probably hate this, no?
Mm-hmm.
And it's owned by the same company that created Alexa as well, the voice. And Alexa, the product, is better at SEO. You agree, right?
Mm-hmm.
Because the SEO product, because they know SEO. But yet the voice device outranks it because that's what everyone's looking for. It just shows you the power of voice search. The other thing to keep in mind is mobile is huge. Google has mobile-first indexing. So it's like mobile results in which if you're using a mobile phone, the index that you see is different than if you use a desktop computer. And on a mobile phone, you're not going to keep scrolling down and down and go to the right one. You're only looking for one result ideally. So this just shows that voice search is going to be really important. Now, how do you monetize this? I don't know yet, and people are trying a lot of things, but I haven't seen revenue come in like mainstream in which people are like, Alexa, book me an Uber. Yes, you can do that, but I just don't see a ton of people doing it yet. Nonetheless, you need to be there because then once people figure out how to monetize, at least you're there at the top or Alexa's using you or Google's, you know, voice version, I don't know what it's called, is using you. And then eventually you can figure out how to monetize once people, you know, test different things out. But for now, you need to be there and trying to leverage search. And I can't emphasize this enough because every time we do a blog post or every time we do a podcast about voice search, it barely gets any views. And I'm not trying to hate, I'm just trying to protect you guys and make sure you guys are doing well in the long run because that is the future whether you guys like it or not.
All right, so that's it for today. I don't think there's much more to add around that. Look into the future, embrace it, don't hate on it.
Oh, one more thing.
Yeah.
We started doing our podcast on Alexa, right? You did that a while ago.
Yeah, Alexa Skill. Yeah, we're on Alexa.
Yeah, and we're getting more and more listens from that, right?
We are, and the people are saying it's the best marketing podcast or skill that they listen to and everything else is crap. And you know what? We actually got a 1-star review, but it wasn't because we're bad, it's because it doesn't work that well on Alexa.
Oh, that sucks.
Yeah. Whoever that 1-star review is, please fix it and make it a 5-star.
Thank you. Yeah, we'd really appreciate that. But nonetheless, that just shows you its popularity because our traffic from it is growing each and every single month.
Yeah, I should check back on that. We'll look at that later. But singlegrade.com/giveaway to check out marketing tools that will grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.
